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Recalling the Apostle of Nonpartisanship

Her fellow anarchists, battling Franco during the Spanish Civil War, dove frantically for cover when, near-sighted and clumsy, she picked up her rifle. Her fellow student, Simone de Beauvoir, finding her weeping on a Paris street, was stunned to learn that her tears were shed for Chinese peasants starving half a world away. Her fellow résistant, Charles de Gaulle, upon reading her proposal to parachute unarmed nurses, in broad daylight and dressed in white, into occupied France ahead of the Allied invasion, blurted out, “But she’s mad!”

Simone Weil died 70 years ago this Saturday at the age of 34 — in an English hospital and, some believe, from self-inflicted starvation. A philosopher and political theorist, a factory worker and farmhand, a French Jew and Christian mystic, Weil often inspired bewilderment no less than respect and wonder in those who encountered her. But there was always a meaning, if not a method, to Weil’s seeming madness — one that deserves our attention today.

Attention, in fact, is key to understanding much of Weil’s work, including her thoughts about political parties. Shortly before her death, she sketched a long “note” — actually, a position paper for her employer, General de Gaulle — on what to do with the problem of too many political parties in postwar France. This was a vexed subject for the general, who never hid his dislike of France’s fractious political system or his conviction that they were responsible for the nation’s defeat in 1940. Politics, he believed, was too important to be left to politicians.

Weil agreed, but not because, like de Gaulle, hers was an imperious personality. Her reasons were philosophical, and they cast a galvanizing light on our own age. At a time when the distrust and disenchantment Americans feel with politics runs deeper than the Mariana Trench, Weil’s essay “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” would no doubt be a best seller. (In fact, a new translation by Simon Leys, the noted Sinologist and essayist, has just been published.)

More than one reader, however, will suspect they were sold a false bill of goods. For Weil spends less time arguing for the abolition of political parties than she does criticizing the lazy and foolish citizens who mindlessly support them. “Democracy and majority rule,” she writes, “are not good in themselves.”

Such assertions may shock us. Yet our tendency to think of democracy as the great end of politics infuriated her: Democracy, Weil insisted, was nothing more than a means to realize goodness. If there were other and more efficient ways to reach that goal, she was more than happy to bid democracy adieu.

Goodness is the only end toward which human beings must strive. This will sound familiar to readers of Plato, as will Weil’s intellectual elitism. Even her most devoted partisans acknowledge that she did not suffer fools gladly. For Weil, people become especially insufferable — because they become especially thoughtless — when they join together to pursue political ends. Political parties cultivate groupthink, Weil argues, not thought.

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Columbia University

She urges us to consider how politicians often begin their speeches with a reference to their party affiliation: “As a Socialist, I think ...” or “As a Communist, I think ...” or “As a Radical, I think ...” But such people do not think; they join parties. In fact, Weil asserts, we take sides for or against a given position in order not to think.

For Weil, the only legitimate purpose in our lives is to attend to the world — to see people as they are, not as we wish them to be. In her view, seeing the world as clearly and justly as possible and basing our actions upon that clarity of vision become a moral imperative. Political parties, she wrote, are a “marvelous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true.”

Of course, she was writing about the political stew simmering in France between the wars, an era when too many parties were exhibiting too little concern about the nation’s well being.

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Our own experience with political partisanship, fueled by cable news and the Internet, would not have reassured Weil. It is as impossible in America today, as it was in the France of yesterday, to examine, in her words, “the frightfully complex problems of public life while attending to, on the one hand, truth, justice and the public interest, and, on the other, maintaining the attitude that is expected of members of a political movement.”

As for the vaunted ideal of bipartisanship, Weil would only harrumph: the only just stance is nonpartisanship.

As Iris Murdoch wrote, our political categories break down when we read Weil. But this hardly means we must adopt her solution. Who would ever pretend that we could, or even should, abolish political parties? Even de Gaulle had to come to terms with them.

But this is not why, 70 years after her death, Weil remains our contemporary. We do not look to her for solutions, but instead, as Murdoch argued, to be reminded of a standard. One need not be a Platonist, like Weil, to see that such a standard is more timely and timeless than ever.